“How is it?” he asks me when I bite into the cheeseburger. Its juice is running down my wrist and I suck it up without bothering with the flimsy napkins.
“Oh my God, amazing,” I say with my mouth full.
He laughs. We sit below the patio speakers, and Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World” medley is playing, barely audible over all the chatter.
“Did you know this song almost never happened?” I say. “IZ called the recording studio in the middle of the night because he had the idea for it. Most recording engineers would hang up on anyone trying to record a song that late, but he was so polite that the engineer got out of bed to do it for him.”
Edison chews pensively for a moment and then dabs neatly at the corners of his mouth with his napkin. His lips are smooth, not a hint that they’ve ever been chapped a day in his life.
“Really?” he says.
“I think he was in poor health when he recorded it,” I say. “If you listen closely at the beginning, you can hear how hard he’s breathing.”
Edison sets down his burger and leans back. He’s scrutinizing me, his eyes narrowed. His expression is so playful, like we’re sitting over a game of chess and he’s waiting to see how I’ll best him. “I never knew who sang this,” he says. “I just think of it as that song they played on every TV drama in the nineties.”
“It definitely fit that style,” I say. “It hasslow-death-scene montagewritten all over it.”
Edison laughs, a sound that’s so loud and uninhibited it startlesme. My stomach flips. He has me, and he doesn’t have a damn clue.Smile back, I remind myself. He’ll think I’m weird if I just stare at him, though I could stare at him like a daft schoolgirl all day. “You’ve got your own way of observing things,” he tells me. “Don’t you?”
I press my lips together, suddenly too self-aware. “I tend to overthink things sometimes.”
He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “You just really see them.”
I study his face. Is he nervous? His smile is a little wider than it was back at the church, and his pupils are dilated, lips parted.
“Anyway, I like the original version fromThe Wizard of Ozbest,” he says.
Of course he does. He loves old movies whose actors are long dead. He’s chivalrous and romantic, and he’ll sayIt’s a Wonderful Lifestill holds up in today’s world. He goes on. “I heard a rumor that they shot the first part of that movie in black and white, and then Technicolor was invented during filming, so they shot the rest of it in color.”
I force myself to eat a handful of fries. If I don’t eat, he’ll think I hate the food, when really, it’s just that I’m too excited and my stomach is all in knots. “I’ve never seen it,” I say.
“The Wizard of Oz?” He raises his eyebrows. “That doesn’t seem possible.”
I loveThe Wizard of Oz. The book too.
“Honest.” I trace anXacross my heart.
Tell me it’s your favorite movie. Tell me we have to watch it together.
He wears his smile like a favorite shirt, and I know that he uses it to mask something.
“It’s a classic, Jade,” he says. “You should really remedy that.”
Yesterday, I liked that name. I chose it partly because of how common it is, but partly because I’ve always had a thing for greens. Butnow I envy this nonexistent Jade Johnson like she’s a windswept lover on the front of a tawdry romance novel. Jade will get the man. Jade will have her happy ending. It will be Jade whom Edison murmurs for in bed, and whose name he writes on the card when we spend our only Christmas together.
I could have given him my real name. The legal one I never use. But it was too risky. It’s been seven years since my sisters or I have been called by the names that were given to us by the state. Those cold syllables are meaningless and dead, like costumes hanging in a closet with no one to wear them.
“I guess I should,” I say. No invite. Not yet. That’s okay. We can play this slow. For him, I’ve got all the time in the world.
He asks me where I’m from, and the answers I give him are mostly true. I was born in California. I have two sisters. I’m the baby. I say this because it implies that I have parents, when in truth I’ve never met them. Whoever my mother is, either she doesn’t want to be found or she’s dead. She pushed my sisters and me out into the world—in which order, we’ll never know—and when we were just days old, someone found the three of us crammed into a single stroller at a rest stop, wrapped in clean towels and with our umbilical cords tied off with plain white shoelaces.
We were all over the news in 1999. Triplets don’t get left out in the scorching sun every day. Our mother could have been the mistress of a corrupt politician, or a scared teenage girl. She could have watched us on the news, our photos taking up three identical squares in the evening segments, as she hid all the signs that she had ever been pregnant and crammed back into her jeans. Or she could have planned to love us as we grew inside her, but then someone stole us away and cut her throat, and as the world searched for the mother of the tripletsDoe, she was decomposing in a landfill somewhere, her corpse none the wiser.
I want to tell this to Edison, I realize. But he wouldn’t be able to love me if I tore away this mask. No one but my sisters would.
For Edison, I ease into Jade. I let her wear my skin.
I steal a picture of him, holding my phone under the table. But even at this awkward angle, he’s beautiful, the sun catching the sharp edges of his cheeks and making the brown of his eyes glimmer—candied amber in the Arizona sun. I’ll have to show him to my sisters for their final approval. We never settle on a kill unless we’ve all agreed, and I’m the only one who’s gotten a good look at him.
